


before we had made any terrible mistakes

by cryptidgay



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Friendship, Gen, Platonic Female/Male Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:22:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22214758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidgay/pseuds/cryptidgay
Summary: Friendship has never been a priority for Gertrude — oh, she'd had acquaintances who probably thought of her as a friend even if it wasn't as reciprocal as they'd thought, and she'd even dated a girl for a few months in university, but she never seemed to feel as strongly for others as they thought she should. Despite that, she and Elias were falling dangerously close to the territory of friendship; a real, genuine friendship, not the kind that comes simply of circumstance and falls apart the moment one finds a new job or moves away.Gertrude and Elias in their early days at the Archives.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard & Gertrude Robinson
Comments: 21
Kudos: 74





	before we had made any terrible mistakes

**Author's Note:**

> thought too much about original elias, "bit of a stoner" elias, pre-[spoilers] elias and gertrude being unlikely best friends & how much that adds to their whole dynamic & suddenly i'd written 3k words of fic. they're peak gay-lesbian solidarity.
> 
> title from teenage talk by st. vincent.
> 
> **content warnings:** off-screen death of a parent & off-screen death of a pet.

Gertrude Robinson joins the Archives just as the previous head archivist disappears. It's a coincidence, to be sure: she never met the man, and she spends a year or so filing his papers and sorting the mess he's left behind. She'll have to redo the organizational system, she makes note, because she is already making plans, fast-tracking herself to fill the gap the previous archivist has left.

She'd said as much during her interview. Gertrude has never been one to mince words — her mother has never approved of that tendency, had given her an earful as a girl, but she has always been headstrong in that way. Never as ladylike as anyone wished she was. She had marched into Mr. Wright's office, resume in hand, and told him: I am not here to waste away my days as a research assistant to some quote-unquote great mind. I intend to move forward. There is a gap open, if I'm not mistaken.

For Wright's part, he didn't look surprised in the least. He'd nodded, let out a breath that may have been half-laugh if looked at in the right light, as if he knew a secret she did not. (She wanted to find it out. She wanted it more than she had ever wanted anything.) And he had said: you're hired, and we'll see about the archivist position.

It is enough, for now.

For now, she bides her time, and she sits at her desk in the researchers' office; there's just the one office, but there's only two of them at the moment, splitting decades' worth of backlogged files between them. It's a miracle they ever get anything done. The other researcher, Adam something-or-other, seems nice enough, but he's a quiet sort, and worse, a spineless one. Every order given by Wright is answered with a quick "yes, sir," as if Adam thinks he is to be fired at the slightest disagreement.  _ File a hundred papers by the end of the day, Janice. Yes, sir. Right away. _

Gertrude gives no points for niceness. Adam is neither good nor bad, friend nor enemy… He's simply  _ nice, _ the word spit out in Gertrude's thoughts as if it is the worst thing one could be.  _ Nice. _

It's exhausting. Gertrude flies through paperwork, lays out a new filing system on scrap paper, jots down notes connecting statement #17680 to statement #9083, all in the time Adam has retyped a single statement. (The handwriting on the original wasn't even that bad, Gertrude notes. It probably didn't warrant the time to type it.)

Adam takes his lunch break. Gertrude does not. Gertrude is still trying to prove something; while Adam has been here, it seems, since the beginning of time, Gertrude has been an employee of The Magnus Institute for a mere three days, and cannot afford to make any mistakes. All her bravado does not mean she is naive: a woman can believe she is the most capable person in the room without being blind to the realities of women's' treatment in workplaces. Especially in academic fields. Especially as young as she is.

She does not lift her head from her notes when she feels eyes on her. Does not glance up. Adam's returned from lunch early, she assumes; good for him. "Hand me the stapler?" she asks.

"Uh, sure," replies someone who is not Adam.

Gertrude looks up, finally. In previous jobs — the library she'd worked in during university, the bland magazine office she'd occupied herself with in between graduation and this — she had been paraded around the office, introduced to everyone. The Institute has upwards of a hundred employees, even if the Archives has fewer than a dozen. She had not, suffice to say, been given much of a  _ grand tour _ , apart from Adam showing her where the break room and the late archivist's files were on her first day.

The not-Adam-someone hands her the stapler, and she looks up at him: a tall fellow, brown eyes, the kind of facial hair that is less intentional and more  _ has not had time to shave for a few days, or perhaps simply does not care about unattractive stubble _ . She would hardly be interested regardless; she notes it clinically, filing away the information to identify him by, to put a name next to and seal away at some point.

Gertrude sorts people into the categories of 'useful' and 'disposable', even at twenty-three. Not-Adam has, aside from following the most basic possible request, not yet shifted himself into one basket or the other.

"I'm Elias," he says, though it sounds almost like a question. A part of her wants to ask if he is sure. She reaches a hand out instead, the one not still holding the stapler, to shake.

"Gertrude Robinson." Full name. Easier to remember, sticks out more. She's learned the tricks. She's got a firm handshake, the kind of handshake that gives but a hint of her strength, and he smiles as he returns it, the kind of smile that goes up more at one corner than the other.

"Filing clerk. Upstairs, mostly, but I'm, ah, sort of the go-between from the spooky parts of the Institute to the parts that actually see the light of day once in a while."

"Right. And I suppose we're the  _ spooky parts? _ " The barest hint of amusement creeps into Gertrude's voice: she has been called a lot of things, but never spooky, not even by association.

"Well, yeah. All the ghosts n' such. Speaking of the light of day — I'm about to go get lunch. Would you like to come?" She doesn't have a chance to respond before his eyebrows raise, just slightly, like he's caught an implication where it shouldn't be. "Not — just because you're new, and all, and Adam down here's a total bore, so I thought maybe you'd like some company. No ulterior motive. Scout's honor."

She laughs. It's the stricken look on his face more than the words. It's the honesty in his tone, without being nice: just honest. (Gertrude isn't sure how she feels about stark honesty on herself, but it's a trait she can appreciate in others, so long as it doesn't get in the way of things. She doesn't like having to guess at people. She is good at it, but that does not mean she enjoys it.)

"Well, I haven't found the decent restaurants in this area yet, so I suppose having a guide to show me around wouldn't hurt."

——

By Gertrude's third month at the Archives, lunch with Elias is an every-other-day phenomenon.

It's odd. Friendship has never been a priority for Gertrude — oh, she'd had acquaintances who probably thought of  _ her  _ as a friend even if it wasn't as reciprocal as they'd thought, and she'd even dated a girl for a few months in university, but she never seemed to feel as strongly for others as they thought she should. (It hadn't ended well, though whether that was her fault or the girlfriend's, she couldn't say.) Despite that, she and Elias were falling dangerously close to the territory of friendship; a real, genuine friendship, not the kind that comes simply of circumstance and falls apart the moment one finds a new job or moves away.

"So," Elias says around a mouthful of french fries, and Gertrude wrinkles her nose. "Wright called me into his office earlier. All ominous — could've sworn it was going to be a dress code write-up. You ever noticed how the Archives staff never gets dress coded, but the rest of the Institute does  _ all the time? _ Conspiracy theory, man. Investigate that one."

Gertrude has not, in fact, noticed that. She spends all of her time in the dusty basements of the Institute, surrounded by people who flaunt the dress code just as much as she does. Adam has worn the same jeans every day since she met him, she's fairly sure. Her own skirts are routinely shorter than what is likely 'appropriate length', but her shoes are always practical to run in, and that has come in handy far more often than a long skirt would.

"Anyway, turns out: he's transferring me to — can I get a drumroll? Build some suspense? No? Okay, Gertie —"

"Not my name."

"Okay,  _ Gertrude _ . No fun. Anywho, he's transferring me to research. Which means…"

"No more stuffy accountants telling you you filed things wrong?"

" _ Precisely. _ And sharing an office with you, of course. But mostly saying goodbye to Philippe in accounting. I've never filed anything wrong in my  _ life _ , Philippe's full of shit."

——

Being research colleagues is a shift from seeing each other only for lunches, but not one Gertrude minds. She's almost surprised by how much she doesn't mind it. Adam is, in addition to being  _ nice _ , a bit of a coward when it comes to field work, and thus most of the burden of in-person follow-ups on old cases has fallen to her shoulders. Now, it falls to herself and Elias, who is more than happy to accompany her on trips, and does not seem to mind her perfectionist tendencies when she researches, and always offers her a hit of whatever he's smoking when she runs into him outside of work hours. (She shares cigarette packs with him, but has only accepted his offer of a blunt once, which sent her into such a coughing fit they were both laughing for ages before she declared  _ never again _ .)

A cigarette balanced between her fingers, the two of them stand outside of an abandoned butcher's shop. There is a faint smell wafting from inside that turns Gertrude's stomach, though she does not show it on her face. They make quite a pair: both hardly in their twenties, her nearly a foot shorter than him, him holding a clipboard and looking altogether unsure of what they're doing here. She makes up for his hesitance in leaps and bounds.

"Come on," she says, a fond impatience at the edges of her words. 

It had taken her little to no time to see the connections in the statements, to find Smirke's categorizations and put names to the patterns: this shop is a textbook example of the Slaughter, but the relevant statement is from over a decade ago. (Dreadful thing, really. An amount of gore sufficient to make even Gertrude need a breath of fresh air after glancing through the statement.)

Her cigarette is handed to Elias (" _ to hold, not to smoke, idiot" _ ) as she picks the lock to the shop.

Elias, peering down at her, eyebrows raised: "Where'd you learn to do that, Gertie?"

Gertrude, brow furrowed in concentration, after a half-exasperated and half-resigned sigh: "My mother never trusted me enough to give me a key to our house. If I left, especially after curfew, I was guaranteed to be locked out, and after spending a few  _ very  _ cold nights sleeping on the porch, I decided I'd like to avoid that."

"Most people'd just sneak in through the window, y'know?"

"Yes, but if I'd done that," she says, aiming a triumphant smile up at him as the old lock gives way beneath her fingers, "I wouldn't be able to break us into places now, would I?"

"Guess we should send a thank you card to Mrs. Robinson for locking you out, huh?" He offers a hand to help her up, and she brushes the dust off her skirt as they walk through the threshold.

"Could, but she's been dead for, ah, four years? Wouldn't be able to read it."

Gertrude says it in the same tone she'd analyze a statement with, and it takes her a moment to realize Elias has paused behind her. "What is it?"

"I'm sorry, Gertrude. I - I had no idea," he stammers, and it's all she can do not to laugh. Not at her own dead mother, but… that's simply a fact of life. She's sure she grieved in the moment, but she and her mother had never truly gotten along in the first place, and more than anything she had felt a weight lifted off her shoulders with the news of her death. Freedom. No more locked doors.

She doesn't laugh, but she does smile, and she tries to make it a gentle thing. It doesn't fit well on her face, but the effort shows. "It's fine. Honestly, fully, truly, it is  _ fine. _ "

As she reaches up to pat his arm (something approaching comfort), he wraps his arms around her, pulls her into a hug. It takes her a moment to fully realize it. Gertrude cannot remember the last time she's been  _ hugged _ — it isn't a great loss, not something she mourns, it does not keep her awake at night wondering what the sensation would be like. But… it is nice. Even squished against Elias' chest, even taking a moment to wrap her arms around him in return, even in the middle of a bloodstained butcher's shop. She tells herself it is more for his benefit than her own, and that may be true, but she cannot deny that this confirmation of sorts, this seal of a real friendship, sparks up a hint of joy in her chest.

He lets go quickly. For all his faults, and Gertrude could list them for  _ hours,  _ Elias is remarkably good at knowing when a boundary is approaching and avoiding crossing it. He steps back, and Gertrude nods at him as if a deal has just been sealed:  _ yes, we are friends, the type of friends who hug, don't make it a big thing. _ He smiles back at her, and she thinks he understands her meaning.

There is little to be found in the butcher's shop, in the end. Gertrude was not expecting much — a hint, perhaps, of whatever ritual had been attempted here, but that would have been too easy. The entities do not deal in easy answers, and she should not expect them to.

She still feels that her step is a bit lighter as they leave, though.

——

Gertrude has been head archivist for two weeks. Two weeks is, apparently, enough time for the other entities to have caught on: there is a new player in their midst, and the hunt has begun. She catches glimpses of funhouse-mirror-distorted people in the corner of her vision, she sees spiderwebs accumulating in the corners of artifact storage and immediately swipes them away with a broom. She —

She stands in the ashes of her childhood home.

The last firefighters have long since left, their plight unsuccessful against the rage of a supernatural flame with a will of its own. They'll remember it as unusual, but mostly just a pity: that poor young woman who'd arrived after the place was already nearly disappeared, the way she'd looked at the house she lives ( _ lived _ ) in all alone with her fists clenched at her sides, the way she had screamed. The firefighters will assume it to be a shout of grief, not the rage she is nearly boiling with.

But rage it is. She has so rarely felt an anger like this, and it burns her.

She is not sure how long she stands among the wreckage, but she returns to the archives — where else is she to go? — with ash staining her skin. Her dress is ruined. She had tried to dig through the debris, find anything that may be left, but the Desolation is thorough if nothing else. Their destruction knows no bounds.

Neither will her own.

Elias sees her first, though she feels the ever-present eye of Beholding on her from the moment she walks into the building, and she shoots a half-hearted glare at the sky as if it could have prevented this. Elias raises a hand, starts to greet her, pauses, takes in her appearance with widening eyes.

"The Desolation," she says before she can ask, "has killed my cat."

"Holy shit," Elias says softly, then takes long steps forward until he is in front of her. There is something dangerously close to pity in the way he looks at her, and she meets it with stone, glaring up at him as if he is the one who has torched her home, as if he is responsible for the gaping loss that sits in her chest.

"Don't," she says. Sharp-tongued. "Do  _ not  _ look at me like that. My cat is dead, my house is  _ burned _ , and I am not grieving. I am not  _ upset, _ I am not going to break down sobbing on the floor like some teenager."

There is a pause, a question in his glance:  _ what are you, then? Surely you must be feeling something.  _ "The Desolation has declared war. I intend to win."

There's something about a 5'1 woman announcing a battle against something so inhuman as to be the subject of only nightmares that should be funny. It should be a joke. But Gertrude's eyes are steady, and Gertrude's spine is soldier-straight, and Gertrude has enough passion and drive in her to destroy civilizations in a blink.

Elias believes that she will fight every entity that dares to wrong her, and more, he believes that she will win.

——

After the fifth night of sleeping in her office, Gertrude digs out Elias' employment records, writes his address on her hand, and sets out to knock on his door.

He'd offered, as soon as she'd told him that in addition to her cat, the Desolation had destroyed her home. Given her that look that said he was trying to balance his urge to help with his understanding of her anger, trying to phrase his offer in a way that wouldn't set her off, and said "You know, if you need a place to stay, my couch is open. It's, ah, not the most comfortable, but probably better than sleeping at your desk? Anyway. Offer's open." She'd said no, and she is resolutely regretting that now as she twists around in a vain attempt to make her back stop aching.

It is three in the morning by the time she knocks on the door to his flat. It's a very Gertrude knock, quick, sharp, to the point. Loud, above all else, but after five minutes he has not answered, and she sighs a  _ I really have to do everything myself, don't I _ kind of sigh and breaks out her lockpicking kit.

She wakes to the sun coming through Elias' living room window. That's nice. No windows in her office; she's an early riser by nature, but it becomes difficult to judge time down there. She's begun to wonder if it was designed that way: an intentional absence of light, a purposeful lack of time, to draw the archivist in to more and more statements. Becoming whatever the Beholding wants them to be without interruption from the outside world.

A sofa is not, in the grand scheme of things, a huge upgrade from sleeping hunched over her desk, but after five days of the latter the former feels like the most luxurious thing in the world.

By the time Elias stumbles into his kitchen, late enough that she has nearly started to worry he isn't there after all (and she could go check, and she will, if it gets any later), she's brewed a pot of coffee and sits on his couch drinking it. If he's surprised to see her there, he masks it surprisingly well: a moment of wide eyes immediately followed by an easy smile. He knows her well enough, by now. He doesn't need to ask how she got in.

"Good morning, Gertie," he says as he pours himself a mug of coffee and adds far too much sugar to it. She rolls her eyes. He grins. "Sleep well?"

"Very," she says, and she means  _ thank you _ .

"Good to hear," he replies, and he means  _ you're welcome _ .

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! comments are super appreciated. 
> 
> hit me up on tumblr at [ghostau](http://ghostau.tumblr.com). if you're curious about my headcanons for gertrude and elias, [i also did some art!](https://kayleerowena.tumblr.com/post/190149688043/the-idea-of-early-pre-jonah-elias-and-gertrude)


End file.
